The History and Afterlife of Malaga Island

Malaga Island is a small island on the coast of Maine, south of Bath in Casco Bay. It was an obscure place, and then in 1908-1912 it was briefly a rather famous place, and now it is a famous place again for the opposite reason.

Sources differ on when the Malaga Island community got started. Some accounts say the first modern resident was Benjamin Darling, a freedman from the West Indies who bought Horse Island nearby in 1794, and whose descendants seem to have lived all around the area. Other accounts say the community was founded by Henry Griffin after the Civil War. But whenever it got started, by 1880 the island was home to 27 people; by 1900 the population and grown to 40. Most were black, but one family, that of Scotts-Irish fisherman James McKenney, was white. The islanders were poor, but, most observers say, not much poorer than their neighbors. They fished, dug for clams, gathered berries, and raised small gardens in soil made from sand, dung and compost. A few worked off island.

Photographs like this one certainly don't make them look especially impoverished; their houses and clothes seem pretty normal for rural Maine. According to the archaeologists who have lately been poking around the site, they had the same sort of stuff as their neighbors.

But some of them were poor enough that they sometimes applied to their town for relief; poor relief; like most other governmental functions, was in Maine the job of the township. Some citizens of the town of Phippsburg resented this. Bad enough, they thought, that black people insisted on living in their town, but that they wanted relief was intolerable. 

The 1890s were a tough economic time in Maine. The traditional industries of wooden shipbuilding and fishing declined, and not much had come along to fill those places. Phippsburg started a long campaign to prove that Malaga Island had never really been part of their township, and therefore that they were not responsible for its inhabitants. In 1905 they succeeded, and the state had to take direct control of the island. 

As I said, this was a rough economic time for Maine, but there was one bright spot: tourism. People from New York and Boston began flocking to the Maine coast every summer. The islands around Casco Bay were scenic enough, and the local authorities were trying to drum up vacation business. They decided that the unsightly poverty of Malaga Island was an impediment to economic development.

Eason Family in Fron of their House

And then the do-gooders got involved. This was at the height of the Progressive movement, and I am retelling this story mostly to ask some questions about the whole business of making other people's lives better. Public health experts from Boston and New York looked at the people living on Malaga Island and saw a sad situation: dirt, ignorance, illiteracy, substandard housing, unmarried couples raising children out of wedlock.

They associated these problems with isolation. This was the same era when we got the stereotype of inbred hillybilly clans in isolated mountain hollows, for which Progressives suggested the same remedies they would be suggesting for Malaga Island: forcibly ending their isolation by public schooling, public health, and other state measures, if necessary driving them out of their tiny "inbred" communities and out into the world. (I have never seen any evidence that mountain communities were particularly inbred in 1900.)

This was also the height of the American Eugenics movement, and some people thought the root of the problems on Malaga Island was in the mixing of races. At this time people began describing the inhabitants, previously considered just plain black under the one-drop standard, as "mixed race." 

In response to all of this a group of progressive Christians founded the Malaga Island Settlement Association to bring aid to the island. In 1909 they constructed a school on the island. The teacher, Evelyn Woodman, was on the one hand committed to helping her students, but on the other had a habit of asking for help by decrying how bad their situation was. This turned out to be a dangerous approach.

In 1911 the governor of Maine made a much publicized visit to the island, "calling attention" to the problems there. A reporter for the Boston Transcript covered the visit in a story titled, "Ignorance, Shiftlessness, Filth, and Heathenism—A Shameful Disgrace That Should Be Looked After at Once." By "heathenism" he meant, first, that the inhabitants didn't regularly go to church, and, second, that some of the couples were not legally married.

(If you ever wondered why leftists of the 60s and 70s defended unwed motherhood so loudly, it's because attacking unmarried parents was an old theme in America, and taking their children away in the name of cleanliness, order, child welfare, and Christian morality used to be routine.)

The eventual result of the dual pressures on Malaga Island – the desire to prettify the neighborhood for tourists, and the desire to improve the lives of the inhabitants – was a campaign to somehow get rid of the place. The local leadership backed an ownership claim to the island pressed in court by one of Phippsburg's founding families. In 1912 a judge ruled for the family and affirmed their ownership of the property. They then evicted the 45 inhabitants. The state demolished the buildings and even exhumed all 17 graves, moving them to the mainland. One whole family was committed to the state's School for the Feebleminded. After passing through several private owners, the island was acquired by the Maine Coastal Trust as a wildlife preserve.

Various people declared this to be a great victory for humanity. But then, very quickly, the story was hushed up. Its rapid disappearance makes it look like some folks were ashamed about what had been done. It was certainly shameful, but I mention this to make the point that some people thought so in 1912. Americans were every bit as divided in 1912 as they are now.

So far as people can tell from 2023, the first public complaint about what happened on Malaga Island was made in 1980 by a newspaper reporter who said people refered to it as "a story best left untold." Then nothing for another decade. There were a few notices in the 90s, and then around 2000 people began to take a greater interest, and over the past 20 years there has been a deluge of publications about Malaga Island and the events of 1912. In 2005 a young adult novel about the Malaga Island story was a Newberry Honor Book.

Which is great; this is exactly the sort of historical event I think people ought to reflect on. But, of course, most accounts one sees these days make no attempt to be balanced; in our discourse this is just a crime committed by a racist state, wielding Progressive rhetoric to destroy another black community.

So let me ask this: if we see children being raised by illiterate parents who had no interest in sending them to school, living in shacks without plumbing or electricity, what should we do? What if the parents are mentally retarded? 

This is not a theoretical problem, but happens in America every day. Today most writers seem to think that the authorities were exaggerating the problems on Malaga Island as an excuse to evict the inhabitants, and maybe so; as I said the pictures make it look like a pretty normal place. But that doesn't mean that nobody is America has raised or is raising children in a way you and I would find appalling. It is now fasionable to think that the people from Malaga sent to the School for the Feebleminded were just being oppressed in another way, but the only testimony we have is from the state officials who thought otherwise.

Most accounts of Malaga Island play up the racism angle. It seems to me, though,exactly like what Progrressives did to white folks throughout the mountain South, evicting them from homes designated "substandard" to build dams or national parks or whatever else the Progressives thought the country needed to progress.

This same issues come up in the history of the Scottish Highlands, where the culture of the crofters was destroyed partly because middle class Victorians thought conditions in highland homes were simply intolerable. They come up over the question of Indian boarding schools in the US and Canada. Who is responsible for children, and their future? Is it just and always the parents, or does the state have a role?

If a way of life looks, to us, horrible and awful and intolerable, should we intervene to save children from growing up that way? 

What if the people are starving, as the Highland crofters did in 1846-1851, requiring millions in aid from city folks? Do people who have asked for assistance on that scale still have a right to go on living as they did?

Yes, there is something cruel and dismissive about the dismantling of Malaga Island. It's a perfect American horror story, set at the intersection of racism, tourism, and real estate speculation. But it seems to me that the whole business of helping other people is often mixed up with assertions of superiority, and that a superior pose can easily be turned into an attack on a people and their way of life. This happened in the Highlands, and on Indian Reservations, and in many other places. It probably still happens. Black intellectual John McWhorter just wrote a whole book aruging that woke anti-racism is an attack on black people, portraying them as weak victims who can't survive wthout white help.

We can, of course, imagine better, less authoritarian ways to help people than evicting them from their homes. But I am not comfortable with foisting all the crimes that have been part of creating the modern world onto racism, classism, and governmental evil. Sometimes, people who really want to help end up doing harm; on the other hand, maybe some ways of living are not very nice, and you can understand why people want to take children away from that sort of world and raise them in a gentler and safer place.

**********

Excellent article by high school student Margo Pedersen.

Good newspaper article.

Historic images of Malaga Island, from the state museum.

Hour long radio show from WMPG and the Salt Institute, A Story Best Left Untold.

Links 8 December 2023

Hallgrímskirkja, Reykjavík, Iceland

Via Scott Siskind, an obituary for Chuck Feeney, who made billions as a pioneer of duty-free shopping and gave away nearly every penny, living his last years in modest obscurity. If you have heard of him it was probably as a major funder of the Irish peace process, throwing millions around to compensate anyone in Ireland who felt threatened by the pending deal.

Interesting renderings of historical figures in modern garb. I think it is a bit literal, not taking sufficient account of past techniques of portraiture, but some are a lot of fun.

The DeepMind team says they have discovered 2.2 million possible new possible inorganic crystals, 380,000 of which should be stable enough for synthesis. Now if only the AI can tell us what they will be good for. . . .

Chinese archaeologists explore a Ming Dynasty porcelain kiln.

A star system has been identified with six planets, all orbiting in resonance with each other. (NY Times, CBS News)

One of Bologna's last remaining medieval towers is in danger of collapsing.

Some seriously wacked-out biology involving cellular "nanobots" that fuse into "superbots" that heal damaged nerve tissue.

The Carmelite Monks of Wyoming are building themselves a new gothic monastery using computer aided design and computer-controlled stone-cutting machinery, which they operate themselves. (Carmelite web site, online article, Youtube)

How Nonconsumption Can Turn Ordinary Items into Perceived Treasures

The northernmost population of scorpions in the world lives on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, England, where there are more than 10,000. These yellow-tailed scorpions, native to southern Europe, probably arrived in the 1700s aboard Royal Navy ships coming to the Sheerness Dockyard. As a bonus, wikipedia has a great article on the dockyard.

Finalists for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year people's choice award.

Excavations near Carlisle, England have uncovered a Roman bath house.

More evidence that immigration boosts Republicans: "An inflow of migrants equal to 0.4 percent of the county population boosts the Republican party vote share in midterm House elections by 3.9 percentage points." Via Marginal Revolution.

During the pandemic, test scores declined for students in all US states, regardless of whether they closed their schools and for how long; now Kevin Drum reports on international data that shows the responses of different countries also had no effect and how far behind students fell. So, strangely enough, pandemic learning loss seems not to be related to whether or how long schools were closed. What was the cause?

This 24-minute video will bring you up to date on the US military's staggering array of new drone programs; the goal is to field so many aerial vehicles that they completely overwhelm enemy defenses, "blocking out the sun like Persian arrows."

Hoard of Bronze Age axes found in Poland; these axes seem to have been used as a sort of money, or perhaps for high-status gifts, since more than half of those that have been found were never used.

The residents of Christiana, an old hippie sort-of commune in Copenhagen, have agreed by consensus to invite the state in to solve their problem with violent drug gangs. (NY Times)

Something else to worry about: the American Great Plains are being invaded by Eastern Redcedar trees, turning more than a million acres of grassland to forest monoculture. The main reason is the decline of fire. (NY Times, Eastern Redcedar Science Literacy Project)

And now anti-immigrant riots in Ireland (NY Times). Around the world it becomes increasingly clear that what drives right-wing extremism is immigration, and especially accepting refugees. How pro-immigration, pro-democracy people should react to that is unclear to me.

German museum asks Italy to return a classical sculpture to them, on the grounds that Mussolini sold it to Hitler in a completely public way, for a lot of money, which should make it entirely different from stuff the Nazis stole or forced people to sell.

The Transformation of Le Plessis-Robinson

Le Plessis-Robinson is a suburb of Paris with about 30,000 inhabitants. The town has become a sort of parable of a possible alliance between conservative politics, aesthetics, neotraditional architecture, and urban renewal to create a better form of modern life. All of this fits together; the backers of Le Plessis-Robinson see public housing in concrete apartment blocks as a dehumanizing, oppressive, immiserating, destructive of real community and local identity, etc., and see beautification using forms drawn from local tradition as the path to a more human future.

An old village, Plessis-Robinson began to change in the 1920s when a couple of large "garden city" condominium complexes were built (above). 

Then, after World War II, a communist local government oversaw the construction of a whole bunch of concrete apartment blocks. By the 1980s the place was in terrible shape: 80 percent of the residents lived in public housing, and street-level shops had a 70 percent vacancy rate. Those concrete towers, some less than 25 years old, were in dismal shape. Crime was high. 

Then in 1989 a new mayor was elected, a neo-conservative named Philippe Pemezec. Asked to describe his plan for the town in one word, he said "beauty;" one of his fist acts was to order the planting of flowers around the center of the town.

Soon afterward he brought in architect François Spoerry, the inventor, leader, and possibly at that point the sole member of a movement he called l'architecture douce; soft architecture. Spoerry created a master plan for the town. The plan emphasized the building of new parks and a new central city, le Couer de Ville, which would be constructed in a neotraditional style which would reference older buildings in the Isle de France. 

The Couer de Ville measures 12 hectares, or 30 acres, and has a density of 69 people per acre, higher than the concrete blocks it replaced.

This was all financed via 1) public/private partnerships with developers, and 2) by allowing tenants in public housing the opportunity to buy their apartments, which could then be converted into housing in the newer buildings.

The design of the new town center draws on tricks widely used in the new urbanism, including resurrecting an old stream that had largely gone into culverts and turning it into a public park.

One point emphasized by Spoerry was eliminating what he considered ambiguous spaces; the lawns around the older apartment blocks were not really public spaces but they weren't private either, which he thought led to their abuse, since nobody was responsible for them. In the new design there is much public space, in the form of parks, but the rest is resolutely private.

Not everyone was happy with all of this, especially the converstion of public housing to privately owned condominiums and the involvement of private developers. But in a showdown election held in 1995, Pemezec defeated a communist candidate by more than 2 to 1, and rebuilding stormed ahead. 

The demolition of a group of college buildings from the 1950s created space for another new neighborhood, called Bois de Vallees.

In answer to critics of this project one can say: the population of the town has grown – it was 21,000 and declining when Pemezec became mayor, but is now 30,000 and rising – and grown more dense. Twenty percent of the new housing is public. The number of jobs has risen by 50 percent. Crime is down. Not a single person was forced out of public housing to make it happen. I haven't found out anything about how the people who took the deals to become owners of their public flats made out, and I know there was a lot of grumbling in England about rising interest rates and so on. But if there have been problems they haven't showed up in the public mood, which is much more positive than before, or in politics, since Pemezec was re-elected twice more by landslides.

And whatever you think of architecture like this (the cultural center), I think it beats more concrete blocks. In fact Plessis-Robinson has become a tourist center of sorts, people traveling hundreds of miles just to see this town's rebirth.

To me the political angle is actually the least interesting. I wrote here last summer about a new urban project in England that was entirely socialist, and I also thought that was great. To me what matters is: paying attention to what people want, which is overwhelmingly not concrete boxes; caring about beauty as a value it itself; being pragmatic about funding and planning; and thinking in the long term. We can make our world better if we put our minds to it, and we will reap the benefits of that in many ways.

Short article 1, short article 2, 13-minute video.

Daniel Immerwahr on Deepfakes

Wonderful article in the November 20 New Yorker about deepfake technology. In it, Daniel Immerwahr notes that although the technology exists to create convicing videos of people doing things they never did, or saying things they never said, this has yet to have any impact on our politics.

First of all, almost all the high-end deepfake videos made so far are porn: "Able to depict anything imaginable, people just want to see famous women having sex." (Asked if she were going to pursue legal action to get such vidoes of herself off the internet, Scarlett Johansson said she wouldn't bother, because "the Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.")

Immerwahr goes on to question whether fake political videos would have any impact even if they were made. He notes that you don't need video to convince people of false things. There was never any evidence that Catherine the Great had sex with a horse, or that Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake," or that Barack Obama wasn't born in America, or that Covid-19 was fake, or that Trump really won the 2020 election. We repeat such things "because they affirm our fundamental beliefs, not because we've seen convincing videos." 

Mind you, it isn't that fake political videos are not being made. They are, all the time, but they are not made to look convincing: "if by 'deepfakes' we mean videos produced using artificial intelligence that actually deceive people, then they barely exist. The fakes aren't deep, and the deeps aren't fake." Instead of realistic videos designed to fool us, we get Dark Brandon shooting lasers out of his eyes. Immerwahr:

There is something gratifying about having your world view reflected visually; it's why we make art. But there is no need for this art to be realistic. In fact, cartoonish memes, symbolically rich and vividly expressive, seem better suited for the task than reality-conforming deepfakes.

Fretting over new kinds of evidence gets us once again back to the fundamental problem that most of our beliefs seem radically undermotivated. Why we believe things is a very hard problem, and sometimes evidence of any kind seems to have little part in the process. That, not deepfake videos, is our real problem.

Léonard Misonne's Photographs that Don't Look Like Photographs

Belgian photographer Léonard Misonne (1870-1943) was best known for taking photographs that look like paintings. He somehow found trees that look just like the trees in Romantic landscapes and clouds that looked just like painted clouds and photographed them in a dreamy way. It took me quite a bit of staring to convince myself that Stormy Weather (1924) really is a photograph, but it is.

Sometimes his photographs were even printed on grainy paper that enhanced the illusion of brush strokes, as in this example.

This amazing work, Leaving Namur Station (1938) is what first drew me to Misonne. Brings out the apocalyptic side of twentieth-century industry.

And a bunch more.

More on Talking Too Much about Mental Illness

Two from Scott Siskind, first a link to a study I already referenced:

Study: teaching dialectical behavioral therapy (a set of emotional regulation skills) in school leads to worse outcomes (although most of these dissipate quickly). I think this fits nicely with other evidence that making healthy people too aware of their mental health is potentially bad.

Second, from this book review:

I was more interested in a sort of sub-thesis that kept recurring under the surface: does naming and pointing to a mental health problem make it worse? This was clearest in Hong Kong, where a seemingly very low base rate of anorexia exploded as soon as people started launching mental health awareness campaigns saying that it was a common and important disease (as had apparently happened before in Victorian Europe and 70s/80s America). But it also showed up in the section on how increasing awareness of PTSD seems to be associated with more PTSD, and how debriefing trauma victims about how they might get PTSD makes them more likely to get it. And it was clearest in the short aside about the epidemic of neurasthenia in Japan after experts suggested that having neurasthenia might be cool, which remitted once those experts said it was actually cringe. A full treatment of this theory would go through the bizarre history of conversion disorder, multiple personality disorder, and various mass hysterias, tying it into some of the fad diagnoses of our own day. I might write this at some point.

Of course, the null hypothesis is that there are lots of people suffering in silence until people raise awareness of and destigmatize a mental illness, after which they break their silence, admit they have a problem, and seek treatment. I am slightly skeptical of this, because a lot of mental health problems are hard to suffer in silence - if nothing else, anorexia results in hospitalizations once a patient’s body weight becomes incompatible with healthy life. Still, this is an important counterargument, and one that I hope people do more research into.

All of this points to a potential explanation for the poor mental health of young Americans, because our whole society, and social media in particular, are full to the brim with talk about mental illness.

Links 1 December 2023

NY Magazine compiles a list of "Every Single Lie Told by George Santos."

This years Comedy Wildlife Photography winners.

In Italy, the high price of white truffles has led to a violent struggle in which truffle-sniffing dogs are regularly poisoned with strychnine-laced meatballs.

On land, datacenters are hard to cool and use a ton of water. A few years ago Microsoft hit on a possible solution, puting shipping-contained-sized computing units on the sea floor 100 feet down. This has not become common but interest continues. (2020 post about Microsoft's first big test, Project Natick; new article about Chinese deployment of the technology; summary article about the pros and cons)

Some weird bits of feudal law that still endure in England. 

From Ella Standage, a poem titled "Faithful" about love and translation.

Human Rights Watch finally gets around to reporting that the projectile that hit a Gaza hospital on October 17, triggering anti-Israel riots across the globe, was likely a misfired Palestinian rocket. 
OSINT guys on X figured this out within 48 hours, but I guess it's good that HRW finally released this finding.

Maya cities had no sewers or privies, and nobody knows what happened to all their human waste. Funny that after reading about the Maya for fifty years I am just now discovering this.

The insane process of choosing the books for the NY Times Ten Best Books of the Year list, which begins in March and includes dozens of meetings with impassioned presentations on behalf of the editors' favorites. (NY Times) Personally I find the 100 Notable Books list much more useful.

Scathing review of Costin Alamariu's (=Bronze Age Pervert's) dissertation : "It’s like saying that philosophy has something to do with fish, because people study philosophy in school and there are schools of fish." But the writer concludes that while nothing Alamariu writes makes philosophical sense it does make you want to live more fully.

Mummies and other cool archaeological finds from a Wari site near Lima, Peru.

Kevin Drum says young men are doing fine.

Russia's Supreme Court declares the global gay rights movement to be an "extremist group," which effectively criminalizes all gay activism in Russia.

Neural net Artificial Intelligence is famously a "black box," that is, we don't have a clue about the details of its reasoning process. In this post, Scott Siskind reads some recent work that tries to understand how AIs reason. One fascinating discovery is that they function by simulating much larger AIs; in one of the toy examples, a two-neuron AI works by simulating a five-neuron AI. So a 100,000-neuron AI is probably simulating an AI with millions or billions of neurons, connected in multi-demensional arrays.

Immigrant neighborhoods probably existed in the very first cities.

Libertarian Alex Taborrok reviews The Big Fail, a new book about pandemic response. Like most others, the authors find that lockdowns, social distancing, and masking had little effect; the only important thing was vaccination. Speeding up the vaccines by five weeks (which we could have done) would likely have saved more lives than all the other measures combined.

Tyler Cowen interviews philosopher John Gray, much about pessimism.

Life on earth is staggering. A new study finds that there are a million trillion trillion living cells (10 to the 30th) and that life has a huge, geological-scale impact on the plant, among other things collectively fixing 250 billion tons of carbon per year. As the authors note, this gives us a way to look for life on other worlds, because life like ours is pretty damn obvious. (NY Times, original article)

Good summary on X of some issues that might follow if Venezuela tries to annex Guyana. Wikipedia has the historical background.

Some remarkable drawings by the artist known as Faith XLVII.

The most powerful cosmic ray particle ever detected was the "Oh-My-God Particle" of 1991. This particle, probably a proton, had an estimated energy of 320 exa-electron volts (eEv), roughly equivalent to a baseball traveling 100 kilometers per hour (63 mph). For a long time it was by far the most powerful particle ever detected, but now there is another in the same range: the Amaterasu particle, detected on May 27, 2021. This had an estimated energy of 240 eEv. Exactly how particles with this much energy could be generated has never been explained, so there was always a nagging suspicion that the measurement of the Oh-My-God Particle was messed up somehow. This second example in the same range is therefore important confirmation. Like the Oh-My-God Particle, the Amaterasu Particle seems to have come from an empty region of space.

Short video showing what looks like an American AGM-88 HARM missile destroying a Russian SAM system, which means Ukraine has figured out how to fire these very effective missiles from its existing jets.

RIP Henry Kissinger

To my mind Henry Kissinger's existence was dominated by two things: his intelligence, and his worship of power. He craved power for himself, and for his country, and he always bristled at anything he saw as a threat to either. He would lie, steal, and murder to protect American interests and his personal prominence. During his years at the top I always thought he secretly preferred dictatorship and believed that totalitarian states had a vital advantage in competition with democracies. I don't think anybody would say that Ronald Reagan was smarter than Kissinger, but Reagan understood a fundamental thing that Kissinger missed: that dictatorships had their own weaknesses, and that the Soviet Union in particular was riven with contradictions that would eventually bring it down.

Kissinger pretended to be a wise man taking the long view, justifying his crimes by pointing to the judgment of history. But he was wrong. From the 21st century we can see that history does not justify him but says, clearly and repeatedly, that sticking to principles is what works, and that few crimes ever end up being excused because their outcomes are so good. Perhaps his worldview was shaped too much by World War II, when horrible violence seemed and seems justified. But the Cold War, as it turned out, was something very different, a conflict in which the moral high ground was the vital territory. That, it seems to me, was a truth that Kissinger, for all his brilliance, could never understand.

Some words about Kissinger from others:

Gerald Ford: I think he was a super secretary of state, but Henry in his mind never made a mistake, so whatever policies there were that he implemented, in retrospect he would defend. . . . Henry publicly was a gruff, hard-nosed German-born diplomat, but he had the thinnest skin of any public figure I ever knew.

George H.W. Bush: Kissinger is an extremely complicated guy. . . . He is ungracious, he yells at staff, he is intolerable in terms of human feelings. Dictatorial. ‘Get people here.’ ‘Have those people here.’ ‘Where are they?’ ‘Why do I need these papers?’ ‘Where are my papers?’ And yet all those petty little unpleasant characteristics fade away, when you hear him discussing the world situation. . . . He is like a politician with the roar of a crowd on election eve or the athlete running out at the 50-yard line just before the kickoff. The public turns him on.

Bill Clinton: He always sounded like God with a German accent.

Barack Obama really hated Kissinger. Here is one sample: We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II, and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell. [I am still]  trying to help countries remove bombs that are still blowing off the legs of little kids.

Spencer Ackerman: Not once in the half-century that followed Kissinger’s departure from power did the millions the United States killed matter for his reputation, except to confirm a ruthlessness that pundits occasionally find thrilling. America, like every empire, champions its state murderers.

I'm going to give Kissinger himself the last word, two lines that I think sum up his worldview:

There is no reason for us to stand by and let Chile go Communist merely due to the stupidity of its own people. 

and

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Cycladic "Frying Pans" as Mirrors

After the famous figurines,

the best known artifacts from the Bronze Age culture of the Cyclades are the enigmatic ceramic objects known as "frying pans." These were first discovered in 1898. The majority of known specimens come from the Cyclades, but others have been found elsewhere around the Aegean, including Crete, Euboea, and the mainland.

Quite a few of these have been found. They range in size from 12 to 30 cm across. Most are earthenware but a few are bronze.

These images show both sides, giving a better idea of the form.

But what are they? There have been many suggestions. They are certainly not frying pans, since they are elaborately decorated on what would be the bottom and show no burning or other signs that they were used for cooking. The suggestion that they were astrolabes seems very far-fetched, since they are not made with the necessary precision. The proposal that they were used for forming salt cakes in a standardized size fails because no two are exactly the same size. One early theory was that they are lids for larger vessels, but no such large vessels have been found. Someone tried to stretch a skin across one and use it as a drum, but it sounded lousy and anyway none of them show any evidence of ever having had skin stretched across them. So the reigning theory has been that they were trays, perhaps for formally serving some special food, or offering something to the gods, or for cosmetics.

Thanks to my old friend, the deranged blogger at Old European Culture, I just discovered a new theory about these that intrigues me: they are mirrors. This comes from an article published in 2008 by two Greek archaeologists, Dimitri Papathanassoglou and Ch. A. Georgouli. 

They tested the theory by filling the pans with various liquids and measuring how much light they reflected. They found that water did not work very well (upper images), but olive oil did (lower images). If the olive oil was blackened by adding charcoal (lower right), they got an excellent reflection in the right light. Fascinating.

Balbals

The people of the Eurasian steppes have been setting up stone statues for at least 5,000 years. They are very hard to date, of course, but we know the one above is more than 4,000 years old because it was found in a burial mound of the Yamnaya culture.

They are spread from Ukraine to Mongolia. One of the common names for them, used in Ukraine and Turkey, is Balbals, which seems to come from a Turkic word for ancestor.

A large group in Ukraine are associated with the Scythians, but I'm not sure why.

This one, in Mongolia, has an inscription in Turkish that says it was erected by a man for his father; based on the style of the writing it has been dated to between 600 and 800 AD. Fascinating headgear.

Many have been moved; in Urkraine and Kyrgystant there are parks where groups of these have been assembled.

These speak to me of the wild, barbaric steppes, and I find them wonderful.